This is an installment in PLATFORM’s ongoing series on migration. Click here to read the previous installment.

The immigration raids that roiled Los Angeles during the summer of 2025 exposed the breathtaking violence of the United States’s migrant detention apparatus in jarringly ordinary settings. The businesses, parking lots, and parks where most of the arrests took place were situated in predominantly Latinx sections of East and South Los Angeles—neighborhoods settled by immigrants amidst the decimation of Fordist industries during the 1970s and 1980s. The working-class neighborhoods that experienced the most ICE activity––Pacoima, Pico Rivera, Bell Gardens, and Vernon—seem a world away from the architectural landmarks of the city’s hillside and coastal areas. But they are filled with different and far humbler “landmarks”: the thousands of immigrant-owned businesses that buoyed the regional economy amidst the devastation of deindustrialization. These are the sites where the abstract forces of globalization and migration “touched down,” crystalizing into a dynamic constellation of small businesses. This landscape has powered the transformation of Los Angeles—and many metropoles—into a global city, while standing as a quiet monument to the creativity and social resilience of the immigrants who made the region their home.

A Global City Under Attack

Not coincidentally, emblems of LA’s global interconnectedness were the first sites targeted by the raids. On the morning of June 6th, federal agents stormed the showroom and nearby warehouse of Korean-owned Ambience Apparel, one of the largest garment importers and wholesalers in the city’s downtown garment district. Dressed in helmets, face masks, and military-style camouflage, they arrested 44 of the firm’s Latinx and Korean workers. Over the ensuing six weeks, similar teams conducted at least 471 “enforcement operations” at strip malls, car washes, factories, parks, schools, and other worksites and public spaces across the region, often heavily armed and using physical force. Scenes from a June 17th raid of the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet—a popular flea market in a converted drive in movie theater (Figure 1)—were later made into a hype video published on the Border Patrol’s Instagram page. Within the context of the recent US government tariffs on all manner of imports, the militarized harassment of swap meet vendors not only underscored the cruelty (and absurdity) of the raids, it also highlighted a larger war on the thousands of factories and small businesses that were responsible for reviving Los Angeles’s economy during the 1980s and 1990s.

Figure 1. Patrons watch and dance to a cover band at the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet. Photo by Alec R. Stewart, 2015.

As geographer Ed Soja and historian Josh Sides have separately observed, this “revival” was partial, driven by the growth of low wage, non-union industries like garment factories. Accompanying this “reindustrialization” was the emergence of what Soja described in 1996 as a “teeming underground economy and an immigrant-fed pool of low-wage labor”. Sustaining this reserve pool of labor were businesses like swap meets. I have argued that the Los Angeles’s swap meet industry, which operated in every low-income neighborhood of color, offered imperfect solutions to the urban problems created by the dismantling of the liberal welfare state and the offshoring of unionized factory jobs by helping investors, vendors, and even shoppers stake out claims to economic and social citizenship.

Los Angeles has the largest swap meet economy in the United States because of its financial ties and physical proximity to its massive garment industry, which employs roughly 40,000 people, and is home to over half of the garment contractors in the nation. Thanks to their loose regulation, flexible site plans, and the openness of their mostly Asian vendors to new ideas, traditional outdoor swap meets as well as newer indoor swap meets have served as the front lines where the garment industry has market tested emerging fashions. More than 2,000 garment wholesalers (or “jobbers”) operate showrooms out of modest storefronts and glitzy merchandise marts in the 107 block Fashion District, with names like Caviar Dremes, Carla Vie, San Pedro Wholesale Mart, and LA Face Mart (Figures 2 and 3). Many of these companies are under Korean ownership, part of a larger ethnic economy that produces and distributes clothes to a range of retailers across the Americas, including luxury department stores, fast fashion retailers, and swap meets. Anthropologist Christina Moon has observed that Korean and Korean-South American “fast fashion families” shoulder enormous risks as intermediaries between retailers and manufacturers in a rapidly changing market sector with razor thin profit margins. An outlay of over $1 million in cash is sometimes required to produce and import just one style of garment, meaning that if the style flops, the clothes must be sold at a loss to liquidators. Indoor swap meets—permanent marketplaces housed within repurposed industrial and retail buildings—were popularized by Korean investors in the 1980s and 1990s as one outlet for the excess inventory of garment district wholesalers.

Figure 2. Wholesale showrooms at E. 15th Street and Santee Street in the Los Angeles garment district. Photo by Alec R. Stewart, 2016.

Figure 3. The Stanford Wholesale Mart at 12th Street and Towne Avenue in the Los Angeles garment district is one of several massive “marts” which house hundreds of garment wholesalers. Within each firm’s showroom, retailers may purchase bulk quantities of apparel for sale in their stores. The BBCN Bank sign (near the top of the building) signals the presence of one of the largest banks headquartered in Los Angeles Koreatown, which cater to Korean-owned wholesale and garment contracting firms. Photo by Alec R. Stewart, 2015.

“In Southern California, complaints about the clientele and goods sold at flea markets prompted numerous cities to raid, regulate, tax, and ban them. These actions have hinged on their widespread associations with “informality,” an idea that connotes poverty and illegality while suggesting non-participation in “formal” market structures.”

The choice of the garment and swap meet businesses for the first ICE raids is part of a longer history of suspicion and shutdowns. In Southern California, complaints about the clientele and goods sold at flea markets prompted numerous cities to raid, regulate, tax, and ban them. These actions have hinged on their widespread associations with “informality,” an idea that connotes poverty and illegality while suggesting non-participation in “formal” market structures. In a survey of the clothes sold at swap meets, I have found that nearly all originate from legitimate wholesalers. However, occasional discoveries of stolen and counterfeit goods reinforce the markets’ spatial and social marginality within the mainstream imagination. In 1978, the City of Pasadena briefly shut down the popular Rose Bowl Flea Market citing traffic concerns, while residents of the San Diego suburb of El Cajon sought to close the Aero Drive-In swap meet in 1981 because of its allegedly “undesirable,” “dangerous,” and “threatening” patrons. And between 1987 and 1989, the Orange County City of Santa Ana attempted to shut down two popular swap meets frequented by a majority Latinx clientele. As the swap meet’s owner put it, “the bottom line is…the neighbors are white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who don’t want Hispanics in the neighborhood.”

Articulating Urban Citizenship in Transnational Consumption Spaces

In an environment hostile to new outdoor swap meet construction, Korean investors responded by building indoor variants of the markets in the 1980s and 1990s. As I have detailed elsewhere, over 100 “indoor swap meets” (as they are somewhat confusingly called) opened within abandoned warehouses and large floorplate retail stores in nearly every majority African American and Latinx section of the city (Figure 4). For Korean investors and vendors, the new marketplaces provided “alternative ladders of social mobility” that helped many attain middle class status. But as historian Shelley Sang-Hee Lee has observed, Korean entrepreneurs working in neighborhoods like South Los Angeles viewed them “simply [as] a place to work, make money, and invest minimally,” in contrast to the ethnic “anchor” of Koreatown. Customers frustrated with the markets’ negotiable pricing, and vendors’ reticence to hire employees staged a series of boycotts in the late-1980s and early 1990s, foreshadowing the unrest of the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion.

In this reading of swap meet space, immigrant vendors claimed their space in the city through their ownership (or leasing) of property. In setting up micro businesses within the matrix of the market hall, they laid an economic claim to membership in American society to overcome their cultural “otherness.” In realizing their economic self-sufficiency, immigrant swap meet vendors met their immediate needs while conforming to culturally conservative “boot strapping” narratives. By doing so, they claimed a kind of cultural citizenship, which anthropologist Aihwa Ong has described as a “dual process of self-making and being-made within webs of power liked to the nation-state and civil society.”

Figure 4. Opened by Korean investors in 1985 within a former light fixture manufacturing plant, the Slauson Swap Meet has operated as a quasi-shopping mall in the historically Black neighborhood of South Los Angeles for 40 years. It is now a frequently cited institution in rap lyrics. Photo by Alec R. Stewart, 2019.

However, as Arijit Sen contends, an over-emphasis on property ownership in architectural history leaves other minoritized groups out of the picture. In my writing about the history of working-class built environments, the “architects” I address are the owners and users who repurpose, reuse, and breathe life back into aging commercial buildings. Within the inner cities and suburbs where swap meets operated, they filled a vacuum created by the withdrawal of mainstream retailers and industrial employers. Moreover, collaborations between market operators, vendors, and shoppers engaged in a “commoning” of these spaces of consumption. At the Roadium and Compton Swap Meets, for example, Asian American record vendors collaborated with West Coast gangsta rap artists including Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, and DJ Quik at early stages in their careers, helping them distribute their mixtapes and produce their first albums. In the lyrics to hundreds of songs, rap artists have asserted their “ownership” not only of cities like Inglewood, Compton, Long Beach, and South Central, but also of swap meets themselves. By cataloging these markets on at least 470 songs and music videos since 1985, rap artists have acknowledged their role of the markets in birthing their genre. They have also singled out the Slauson, Compton, Roadium, Del Amo, and several other swap meets as West Coast hip hop monuments, shrines that hip hop fans visit to pay their respects. In laying claim to this landscape, hip hop artists articulated a vision of urban citizenship that had little to do with property ownership. Instead, they articulated their right to the city by making their stories, lives, and hometowns visible through their lyrics. These claims have since reverberated around the world on recordings produced by N.W.A., Dr. Dre, Kendrick Lamar, and other hip-hop artists associated with Los Angeles.

“As public services deteriorated amidst the collapse of the liberal democratic state, and urban inhabitants were increasingly left to fend for themselves, new solidarities have emerged out of acts of city building.”

Globalization, neoliberalism, and increasing global migration of the past fifty years have strained liberal democratic conceptions of national citizenship, a crisis that is now palpable in anti-immigrant raids across the United States. As James Holston and Arjun Appadurai have pointed out, global cities—with their diverse sets of peoples and publics—have served as “strategic arenas” for the development of new forms of urban citizenship that respond to the challenges of a cosmopolitan society. As public services deteriorated amidst the collapse of the liberal democratic state, and urban inhabitants were increasingly left to fend for themselves, new solidarities have emerged out of acts of city building. “This making,” Holston writes, “is the basis of their claim to have a right to the city, a contributor right to what they have made, a claim that has nothing to do with formal or informal statuses of work, housing, or immigration. To the contrary, it only has to do with the active life of residents.” This is a right to urban citizenship that is rooted in the co-construction of many forms of public spaces.

Figure 5. T-Shirts depicting murdered hip hop artist, Nipsey Hussle, at a Slauson Swap Meet vendor booth. Photo by Alec R. Stewart, 2019.

In the 1990s, Korean entrepreneurs fashioned a version of these strategic arenas by sidestepping hostility to one market form and developing another. Drawing on their connections to the garment industry, they built a constellation of businesses that have encoded within them what historian Winston Kyan the “dark and light folklores” of immigration. As architectural historians, we have a choice in the stories we tell. By studying small spaces like indoor swap meets and other commercial buildings, we can find repeated instances of resistance to oppressive power, stories that are especially relevant amidst today’s ongoing immigration raids. Telling these stories demands that we attend to the marginalized material cultures and voices that live within the built environment. Oral histories and interviews, as well as the “rebel archives” of song lyrics, social media posts, graffiti, and other “fragments,” remain underutilized starting points for these counter-hegemonic histories.

Citation

Alec R. Stewart, “Landscapes of Intimidation and Resilience: Claiming Urban Citizenship in the Marketplaces of Los Angeles,” PLATFORM, November 3, 2025.